Rob Barton and Chloe DeCaen arrived in the quaint little town of Sheridan, WY, population approximately 16,000, late Sunday evening. Nestled in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, the town was steeped in western history. Buffalo Bill Cody hired his Wild West Show performers from the front porch of The Sheridan Inn, built in 1893. They checked into the historic Mill Inn slightly before midnight. Placards and posters delineated the history of the former flourmill. The actual mill building was remodeled into a 45-unit motel and the tower was converted into office spaces, sometime after ConAgra (formerly Nebraska Consolidated Mill Company) sold the facility in 1974.

After breakfast at the Perkins Family Restaurant, they located the Sheriff's Office. "Hi. I'm Rob Barton and this is Chloe DeCaen….."

"Just, hold on there a sec." County Sheriff Jack Dawson held up a finger to bring any further interruption to a halt. He was employing the `hunt-n-peck' typing technique, to finish a report. With lips pursed in a tight line under a drooping white mustache, he scrutinized the monitor in front of him, glancing down occasionally to select a few letters or maneuver the cursor to a new location on the report. "Okay, if I can just get this thing printed and saved; we're off to the rodeo." He muttered aloud. The whir of a nearby printer heralded his success. He sat back in his creaky wooden chair to appraise his visitors with bright blue eyes.

"You know, 9 outa 10 vehicles, out there." Dawson laconically gestured to the cars and trucks lining the street. "Are unlocked with the keys in the ignition, and not a soul around here would make off with one of'em. But, you damned well better lock your bicycle up! That makes the fourth Mountain Bike stolen in three months. What can I do for you folks?"

"Rob Barton and Chloe DeCaen, FBI."

"Seems a might serious." Sheriff Dawson drawled after inspecting their IDs.

"We believe you have a serial killer living in your community. Rachel Jennings, aka Connie Henson and Vanessa Thomas, is listed as living at 1450 Grayleigh Lane."

"You don't say." His right eyebrow rose, climbing toward his snowy white hairline. "And, a woman, to boot."

"That's correct."

"Hmmm, that place is out toward Beckton off Highway 331. Oscar Grayleigh owns a pretty good spread out there, hence Grayleigh Lane. He hit some hard times, a few years back, and sold off some `Ranchettes', on Big Goose Creek."

"Ranchettes?" Chloe asked.

"Yeah, mostly folks from `the big city', buy'em `cause they want a place in the country to retire to or to have as a vacation home. They'll snap up a place that's, oh, around five or six acres, `specially if it has any kind of view of the mountains. Lots of folks from California and Texas, `course they usually high-tail it after a few winters."

"We have a warrant for her arrest issued by a Federal judge in Denver."

"Well then, I'll get my hat and we'll go pay her a visit."

"If he comes back with spurs on, I'm gonna shit!" Rob whispered.

"Shhhh! He'll hear you."

"Hey, I'm not the one who looks like an extra from a John Wayne movie. You know, he kinda looks like Sam Elliot."

"Maybe, he has a nice, big Bowie knife I can borrow. Now, shut UP!" She hissed.

They arrived at Rachel Jennings' property at 8:30 AM. The two-story house was built into the top of a hill with only the top floor exposed to the frigid winter winds. There was no answer at the front door and the place had a generally deserted feel to it. They peeked in the garage; one side was empty. The other housed a miniature caterpillar, presumably for plowing snow from the gravel drive in winter and a four-wheeler. Chloe and Rob wandered around back while Sheriff Dawson went back to his car to call Oscar Grayleigh.

A deck with a magnificent view of the mountains ran the entire length of the leeward side of the house; half of it had been enclosed as a sunroom. Chloe peaked in a window beside the door. The interior was designed to resemble a rustic log cabin. Garden stones in the shape of bear paw prints formed a path across the dark green all-weather carpet to a set of French doors. The room was cosy with its little pot-bellied gas stove nestled in the far corner, an inviting place to spend a lazy afternoon reading during the long winters.

"The door down here is unlocked." Rob shouted up.

"This one is, too." Chloe replied after trying the knob. She unholstered her service revolver and cautiously entered. After searching the upstairs, she had just re-entered the kitchen to begin a more meticulous search when Rob came bounding up the stairs from the lower level.

"You'll never believe it! There's a full lab set up downstairs."

"A lab?"

"Yeah, looks like, maybe, she was paying her bills by synthesizing drugs."

"You're kidding!" She rushed down the stairs to see for herself. The lab was a lot more than she expected. It was well lit, well organized, and very well equipped including two fume hoods, an IR spectrometer and a Gas Chromatograph. It wasn't hard to identify the fundamental items of the drug lab. The pièce de résistance was the distillation apparatus set up in the first fume hood; the three necked flask, nestled in a heating mantel, had to be at least two liters. A Rotary Evaporator was set up in the second hood and Chloe spotted a filter flask by the sink. A large Buchner funnel was stuck between two pegs on the drying rack.

"Well, when she wasn't cooking up other stuff, she apparently did a little home brewing. There must be twenty cases of beer over here! I guess that explains the microbrews at the scenes."

"Something doesn't feel right." Chloe stated, ignoring Rob's exuberant outburst of the beer find. As she studied the slight disorder in the lab, she realized Mantis had obviously, hurriedly prepared another batch of drugs and fled. "I think our chicken, has flown the proverbial coop."

"What?"

"She realized she messed up. She made more drugs, probably for traveling money. All we can do now is search the place and hope to figure out who her contacts were." She bitterly replied with a heavy sigh. Rob left to inform the Sheriff.

Chloe wandered to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf near the door. It housed a number of chemistry and biochemistry textbooks, the standard reference texts and a number of laboratory notebooks. She noted that six of the nineteen volumes, according to the numbers on the spines carefully scripted in pale pink paint pen, were missing. Looking around, she found volume twenty lying on the nearby lab bench. `Gotta start somewhere.' She thought with another sigh.

She sat down at the desk in the outer room, which she decided was a combination library and office. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls with all sorts of books; alphabetically arranged by subject, author and title. She turned on the banker's lamp and immediately found three of the missing lab books. She was flipping through a pile of empty file folders, labels indicating coded business transactions, when she happened upon an unlabeled laboratory notebook. After reading a portion of the first page, she realized she had stumbled upon the most recent volume of Mantis' personal journal. She hurriedly turned to the last entry.

"Oh, Fuck!" She whispered aloud.

TBC